'Skate 2' is coming back to Xbox, but EA's still turning off the servers

The Skate franchise was never as popular as its main rival Tony Hawk, but the trilogy of games still garnered a die-hard fanbase that's eagerly awaiting a new entry. However, while those fans celebrated the addition of Skate 2 to the Xbox backward compatibility list (as a nostalgic stopgap, if nothing else), publisher EA almost immediately put a damper on the excitement by emphasizing that it's still turning Skate 2's servers off this December.

To be fair to our corporate overlords, maintaining the server infrastructure for legacy games is a notable expense, though some of these titles likely still earn the companies revenue on digital storefronts. Still, it's unfortunate timing, especially considering that fans have been asking for Skate 2 to be added to the Xbox One and Xbox Series X backward compatibility list for years now.

Turn switch to "off" — In a tweet responding to Xbox's expansion of its library, the official Skate Twitter account stated that the servers for the game will be turned off on December 10, 2021 on both Xbox and PlayStation. "It's not an easy decision and not something we take lightly," the post states in part. As you might expect, the top reply to the tweet castigates EA for "killing the mood" brought on by the announcement. Oof.

Let's be honest: there probably aren't that many people playing Skate 2 these days on any given weekday, though we might be wrong. That said, this move by Xbox is exactly the sort of thing that would give the game a second wind, if only for a few weeks or so. At least you can still play the game's single-player mode.

The wait continues — Though the Skate series hasn't seen a fresh entry since 2010's Skate 3, EA announced that it was reviving the series back in 2020 with a new studio called Full Circle. There's still no real word on what that new Skate game will be like, or if it'll even be called Skate 4, but at least that's something that franchise fans can look forward to. In the meantime, there's always Skate 3, which was way better than Skate 2 anyway.